Watermarks

So far I have either been oblivious or lucky. Some people like my pictures which could mean they are downloading them and even representing them as their own. No amount of HTML or JavaScript technology can prevent this. Even watermarks have questionable efficacy as people get better.

Google’s Picasa is my current image editor. With it, I am able to manipulate photographs easily prior to posting them online. For everything it does, Picasa does a fantastic job. One of two things* it lacks is adding a watermark. If it automatically did this at the time a photo was saved, then I would definitely be a happy user. Maybe it will hit the features of Picasa 3?

Years ago, I knew how to do add a nice watermark in seconds with Photoshop 6 and 7. Over the last hour or so I have been playing with GIMP to accomplish the same. This has been slow going. First, in GIMP 2.2.3, the software crashed each time I opened the text tool. Now that I am on 2.4.5, the text tool works. Second, I have not found anything similar to the hand tool.

I followed a GIMP watermarking tutorial for one as it was better detailed than another I attempted to follow and was frustrated at not being able to find what it told me to use.

4 thoughts on “Watermarks”

Its funny…I don’t mind people downloading my pictures to use as wallpaper backgrounds, or similar uses, but I get so frustrated when they repost them on their blogs, etc. I get annoyed with Flickr because I want to make *some* pictures non-downloadable, and others available.

With Flickr you can set the Creative Commons licensing on a per-picture basis which determines how hard Flickr makes it to download the picture.

Unfortunately, whatever the user sees they can download. For instance, they just put a transparent GIF at a higher Z level over pictures to protect them from being downloaded. One can just go to the cache and grab it, use the Image Zoom Add-On for Firefox, or other means to get the photo. Flickr has gotten better at preventing unauthorized users from getting large versions.

I’ve been using the watermark tutorial you mentioned above for a while now. I went through it again after reading this, to see what part had stopped you.
What part couldn’t you find?
I’ve checked with 2.2, 2.3 (old dev version) and 2.4 and it works ok.